People are always interested in the information about who is their ancestors and if certain ancestor(s) are a historic person, hero or other famous one. A convenient way to record, search, and/or display such information is certainly in demand. Currently, there are many approaches and designs trying to meet the needs; and most of them are very similar to a traditional family tree. People are familiar with such traditional family trees. However, there are a few intrinsic problems associated with such kind of family tree. Some major problems are described as follows.
One major issue of the currently available genealogical mapping tools is the difficulty to accurately and effectively display all family relations in a single graph format. The most common genealogical mapping tools are pedigree charts, also commonly known as family trees as mentioned above. While the problem with these types of genealogical graphs is that they only display direct family relations, such as parents and grandparents, and do not show how family groupings relate. They do not show common ancestors such as siblings, cousins, etc. In addition, pedigree charts cannot easily show relationships between individuals of common ancestry. An example of this is cousins that many. This is pretty common in history.
It is also a fault of the pedigree chart design to show a family grouping and/or its relationship links multiple times in the event that errors in the data are present. These errors can come in the form of duplicate individuals, duplicate family groupings or circular references. The pedigree chart layout makes these errors difficult to understand and difficult to find by users. A variation of the pedigree chart is the enhanced pedigree display. This design shows common ancestors but requires the user to zoom in and out of areas in the graph or use various view features to show duplications and other data features. Thus, the enhanced pedigree display does not alleviate the faults of the standard pedigree display.
Another problem associated with the pedigree charts lies in the fact that they allow data to be presented in a directed cyclic graph. This means that data can loop back to itself, an example being that an individual can be shown as their own ancestor. This may lead to some confusion in some cases. By allowing data to be stored in a cyclic fashion, there is much room for the creation of erroneous data. A true display of genealogical relationships should be in a directed acyclic graph, in which the genealogical data cannot be looped or linked back to itself.
In addition, pedigree collapse is another source of trouble for standard pedigree charts. Pedigree collapse occurs when two individuals with a common ancestor reproduce. In effect individuals and/or family groupings can be shown multiple times leading to much confusion when trying to interpret a pedigree chart. Many times, it is difficult to tell if a family grouping is actually a duplicated family grouping or a single family grouping that is being displayed twice. This problem also occurs with the use of an enhanced pedigree display. Furthermore, pedigree collapse also causes a problem in displaying relationship links between two individuals on a pedigree chart. Often times it is necessary to display these relationship links in a textual format as they cannot easily be displayed in a graphical layout.
Therefore it is the objective of the present invention to create a display in which all family data is displayed in a single view. The problems associated with pedigree collapse will no longer exist as this system presents a means to graphically display all family relations and common ancestors, not just direct ancestors. This single view layout allows family relationships to be easily displayed in graphical form. As all family relationships are graphically displayed it is easy to discover and fix any erroneous data that has been entered into the system.